Women: Stop Posting Your Dating History For Clout

People have always dated for status. Plenty date for love, companionship, sex, fun, whatever—but status is, more often than not, tangled up in there, too. There are politically advantageous marriages, rich older men dating hot younger women, the captain of the high school cheerleading squad and the captain of the football team. It’s normal to consider how the person you’re dating impacts how you’re perceived by the rest of the world. 

This week, women on Twitter (look, I know it’s called X, you know it’s called X, we both know what I mean when I say Twitter, regardless) have been listing out their dating history in participation with a viral trend. Often, the lists are intended to be funny, even if they’re true. Some women write that their entire dating history is just gay men and finance bros, others write that theirs consist of men in prison. But many who are posting their dating histories seem clearly to be doing so in order to demonstrate the caliber of men they attract—one, for example, detailed multiple lawyers, plus a vague “billionaire.” 

There is obviously something fun about participating in a trend like this. It checks off all the boxes of what makes a tweet enjoyable to craft: listing things, bragging, showing off one’s unique eccentricities. It builds lore around our online personas. But it is also simply too much information. We all want to be Carrie Bradshaw, mining our sex lives for stories, but we’re forgetting the crucial point that the dating lives of Sex and the City maintained a mystique. Carrie didn’t know Big had been divorced until they had been dating for months. I’m not sure the women even knew each other’s ages until Season 3. Yes, they all identified the people around them by their careers just the same (the nickname Big is itself a reference to what a big deal, hot-shot finance guy he is), but the extended histories of their relationships had little to do with how they each represented themselves to the world.

Like in Sex and the City, though, the trend demonstrates the fact that many women do indeed date men as though they’re shopping for shoes. They’re looking for items to signal meaning primarily to other women, to prove themselves as in or above the same league as everyone else. What’s most crass about these posts isn’t that it lays flat the truth that people date for status but that the status the trend attempts to yield comes from a place as pointless as Twitter. We’ve cheapened human connection down to a list of job titles and net worths in exchange for the off chance that someone online is impressed that a guy with an advanced degree took you out to dinner. 

This isn’t a knock on everyone who has engaged with the format: many have been funny in demonstrating the patterns some of us fall into or the surprisingly disparate types of people we date. Some have just been pure shitpost! But even so, these types of trends often push us into revealing more about ourselves online than is necessary. It’s been said before, but it’s true: we should all know less about each other. This isn’t just because the feds are keeping a detailed folder of your entire life history (which, maybe!) but because we’d probably be better at forming real relationships if we did. A little mystery is sexy.